The Long Night
by romanescue
Summary: On the other side of the veil is a night without end. Under a blood moon, the Hunt starts anew. Gothic/cosmic horror, no romance, sporadic updates. [Readers do not need to be familiar with Bloodborne.]
1. Yharnam

**The Long Night**

 _Chapter One: Yharnam_

* * *

The moment Harry's hand went through the archway's gauzy veil, he knew he'd screwed up. It had been pure impulse to jump after Sirius, to try to yank him back out. He met Hermione's terrified gaze for the briefest of seconds, tried to say something - but before he could get a sound out, there was a dizzying sense of movement, a feeling of a great hook lodging itself into his naval and _yanking_. And everything went black.

Harry slammed into cobblestone ground with his palms first. If not for his Quidditch-honed reflexes, his wand would have gone flying out of his hand from the impact. It took close to a minute to blink himself out of his disorientation, another thirty seconds until he noticed Sirius kneeling unsteadily a few meters up ahead, looking a second away from bowling over. ' _Not dead, then,_ ' Harry thought, and it sounded much more glib in his head than how he really felt. ' _Neither of us_.' There should have been some relief in that knowledge, but as Harry stared at the buildings lining the street around them, what he mostly felt was a kind of creeping, bewildered dread.

To their right was a path to what looked like some kind of church or castle, a gigantic structure with black-roofed towers reaching for the murky skies above. The path was lined with abandoned carriages reminiscent of the ones drawn by Thestrals back at Hogwarts. These looked even older though, and like they'd been left where they stood a long time ago.

Somewhere above him, a church bell rang. It was a distant, ominous sound that coupled with the dark structural silhouette of everything in sight reminded Harry of the bells that had sounded out the funeral of one of his classmates in primary school, what felt like a lifetime ago. But the ringing kicked him into movement, a sudden sense of urgency carrying him forward to Sirius side.

"Sirius?" Harry shook his godfather's shoulder, gently first, only to yank on it with proper force when Sirius just wobbled in place. The church bell rang again, and the sound made Harry want to hunch his shoulders anxiously. The stones underneath his feet were cracked and dirty, and when Harry leaned forward the gravel made his sneakers slide backwards.

"Mhhh? Harry?" Sirius voice was a quiet, papery rasp, but it bolstered Harry all the same. He clutched his wand tighter to his chest, trying to understand his own need to find something to hide behind. It was just a gut feeling, an overwhelming sense that something was very off about this whole place, and Harry had learned to trust this particular instinct of his.

"Sirius, something is wrong. I don't know where we are, but-" Somewhere to their right, Harry heard footsteps pass softly over stone. The back of his neck prickled, but before he could decide to drag Sirius behind cover, the sound of those steps faded into the distance.

Sirius was staring at the sky through a great arch of stone ahead of them. Dawn or dusk was tearing through the clouds and staining them a deep red color. "I don't think we're in England anymore, godson mine," he murmured, the corner of his lips riding up in what was clearly more of a nervous tick than any real amusement.

"Yeah," Harry breathed quietly, and brushed his scraped palms against his jeans before helping his godfather stand. Sirius right knee didn't want to bend properly and he took a few steps backwards to lean against an ornate iron gate behind them. Harry eyed a dusty coffin someone had dumped into an old flowerbed just beside the gate, and tried not to think about what might be inside it.

The church bell rang again, and Sirius twitched at the sound. Harry pulled up the leg of his jeans and waved his wand over the scraped skin. His _Episkey_ wasn't as good as Tonks' or Hermione's, but at least the skin mended itself.

"I should have paid more attention to healing spells in school," Sirius muttered. "All I ever got around to were a few painkiller spells. And that was mostly for Remus sake…" He tapped his wand over his knee and then leaned his weight gingerly on his leg. "It'll do for now."

He stood more firmly, surveying the area with an uneasy calm that Harry envied. His stomach was a tight knot below his ribs. Dust motes moved slowly in the cold air and Harry turned to examine a timeworn iron lamppost to their right. It was dirty and unlit, bent over itself like something had at some point smashed into it. And it didn't look like the modern, electric kind. ' _Does that mean we're still in the wizarding world?_ '

He glanced at his godfather. "What do you think is going on?"

"I never cared for the extravagant myths surrounding the Department of Mysteries," Sirius began, his forehead creasing into deep furrows as he thought. "But there were a whole lot of uncanny stories about that veil. I think I remember something about how it was a passageway to the underworld, or hell, or something like it. And other, less common stories of alternate dimensions… though the prevailing belief was that the veil just killed you."

"You… when you fell in, your face slackened," Harry started, staring hard at the stones beneath his feet. "And your eyes were like milk." A hand landed on his head, ruffling his already tangled hair.

"That explains why people were so sure it was a veil of death, I suppose," said Sirius, not commenting on how thick Harry's voice sounded. He rolled his shoulders, gaze passing over the buildings that towered up ahead. "We can't stay here."

"I heard footsteps over there," Harry said, pointing to where the carriages stood. Sirius stared hard in the direction Harry pointed, and then he raised his wand again and gave it a flick. He tilted his head to the side, like he was listening for something.

"Yeah, there is definitely someone there. Maybe they'll know what's going on?" Sirius mused, though he didn't look particularly eager to move. Maybe Harry wasn't the only one with that gut sense of dread.

"They might not be helpful. Maybe they don't speak English here. Or maybe… maybe they're hostile." Sirius made an agreeing sound, but Harry wasn't done talking. Huffing out a breath, he continued, "But we should probably try anyway, don't you think? Or we won't get anywhere."

"I agree. But be on your guard," Sirius said, eyes flicking up over the dark towers and then down to meet Harry's eyes.

' _As if I could be anything else_ ,' Harry thought. His shoulders were so tense he had to make an effort to relax them.

They moved towards the first carriage, Sirius a few steps ahead and Harry following close behind. This time he was going to keep an eye on his godfather. Hermione had been right when she'd called Sirius impulsive, though it had angered Harry at the time. Now he wished he would have listened. ' _Feeling guilty won't help right now, though._ '

There was a red door set in the dirty brick wall behind the second carriage, but the footsteps came walking back towards them before either of them could remark on it. Sirius flicked a look at Harry, who nodded. The footsteps weren't hurried, or heavy, and they had no reasons to assume anything of the people in this - place. Just because the atmosphere hung over the whole area like a funeral shroud that didn't mean… well, it didn't mean anything concrete yet.

Sirius stepped out into the street as the person came closer, hand raised in greeting. Half heartbeat later, Harry threw himself into his godfather and they both went careening into the wall. The man swung a big axe in an arch that would have cleaved Sirius in two if Harry hadn't crashed into him in time. Instead the axe met the hard ground. Breath in his throat, Harry threw himself backwards when the man jabbed a lit torch at him.

" _Stupify!_ " he yelled, brandishing his wand, and the man went down like a sack of potatoes. Harry exhaled harshly, fingers tingling with adrenaline, but turned to look at Sirius before he dared take a step towards their downed opponent. He spotted a metal device, perhaps a lever, next to the wall behind his godfather.

"Shit," Sirius muttered, righting himself while kneading his injured leg. "What in Merlin's name was that?"

"He didn't get you?" Harry asked and Sirius shook his head before bending forward to take a closer look at the man's weapon. The blade was darkened and discolored, its edge dotted with rust-colored blood.

"There are more people over there," Sirius said, squinting over to the narrow street that continued on their right. "But they don't seem to be moving."

Harry backed up towards the red door, but though it was clearly unlocked, it wouldn't budge no matter how hard he pulled on the handle. He didn't want to try a _Bombarda_. Who knew what sort of people would hear that and come running?

"I think this is a dead end," Sirius said, grabbing the axe from the crazed man's prone body. With a twist of Sirius wand, the man's torch was no longer burning.

"There's some kind of lever here," Harry said, staring at the metal contraption. He could have suggested that they go back to the iron gate the veil had spit them out next to and climb over it, but frankly, he didn't want to run around these unfamiliar streets haphazardly. "And… I think that's a ladder up there," he continued, squinting to make out the outlines of what he at least thought was a folded ladder somewhere high above.

"Try pulling it?" Sirius suggested, scratching his neck with a look of disquiet. "I doubt it'll cause crazy people to fall from the skies."

' _In for a penny…_ ' Harry thought, and wrapped his hands around the handle. The metal was cold and rusty in his hands, like it hadn't been used for a good long while. With a metallic whine, the ladder above unfolded towards the ground.

"I guess you were right," Sirius said, limping slightly as he came closer. He'd strapped the axe to his hip and kicked the ladder before he took a step up. Harry would have volunteered to go first, but their very short fight had obviously further hurt Sirius leg. He'd rather be in position to catch his godfather if he slipped on the slick iron rungs.

But they made it all the way up with relative ease, though a deep, inhuman shriek from somewhere down below almost made Harry jump out of his skin. ' _What is this place?_ ' He didn't think it was "hell" or "the underworld", but Hermione had once mentioned reading about other dimensions with strange creatures and stranger people. He hadn't really paid attention to her then. Maybe he should have.

At the top of the ladder, Harry and Sirius stood in silence for a long moment, looking out over the area from their high vantage point. There was a bridge somewhere off to the right, and everywhere in the distance were more of the dark, high-towered buildings. They had the same type of high arches and vaulted windows that medieval muggle churches had. Maybe some of them were churches; several of the buildings had weather vanes atop their pointed towers. Perhaps that was where the ominous bell ringing was from.

But there was a sense of abandonment blanketing the panorama before them. Though every building was ornate and gave the impression of having been crafted with careful attention to the smallest detail, they looked uncared for. The high brick walls and corrugated metal roofs were dark and dirty with old age.

The sun lent the black rooftops a dark reddish glow and that underscored the _otherness_ of the whole environment. Like there was something wrong with everything, a layer of something invisible but easily felt covering everything in sight. Or _from_ sight.

"Definitely not England," Harry murmured and Sirius snorted half a laugh. The slight sound made it easier to breathe, made the silence and the sporadic staccato screeches in the distance a little less oppressive.

There was a low stone fence lining the ground on this level, just as ornate as the iron gate had been. It was even topped with little gargoyles that seemed to leer at him when he glanced over. ' _We went up the side of the building, so why are we now on a street? Shouldn't we be on a roof?_ ' he thought, gaze darting from one building to the next. The cobblestones were cracked and wet up here, and the air had that rusty tang that he thought might be how old blood smelled when it seeped into the very foundations of a place. It was a morbid thought, and difficult to put aside once it entered his head.

"I wonder what these black shrubs are?" Sirius mused as they headed towards the closest building. He kicked at one of them and it swayed like seaweed under water. It looked like a caricature of a real plant, like someone had only half-remembered what this plant should look like and planted those shadowy memories in the ground.

"I saw some down there too," Harry said, though his focus was more on the heavy-looking wooden doors up ahead. Above the doors was a stone relief that reminded him of a nativity scene from a church Petunia had once made him attend. There were five figures, perhaps angels, looking out at the street with peaceful expressions.

"There is light in the window," Sirius said quietly, and indeed there was light shining through the heavy curtain of a window on the left. "Somebody is obviously home."

"Another axe murderer?" Harry suggested, hoping he sounded more nonchalant than he actually felt.

"Let's hope not." Sirius walked around the house trying to look in through the window, so Harry decided to approach the leftmost door. He went over how he would dodge if the occupant was another crazed axe-wielder, and how he would have to direct his wand if he wanted to stun them quickly. Then he rapped his knuckles on the door.

"I can see you both lurking out there," said a male voice from somewhere inside, and Harry almost jumped at the perfectly even, perfectly sane tone.

"Uh, hello?" said Harry carefully through the wood. "We, uh, mean you no harm?" he tried, when there was no reply. He exchanged a look with Sirius, who'd come to hover behind him.

"Hunters, are you?" the voice asked, but before Harry had a chance to ask what that was supposed to mean, the man inside continued, "And not from around here, either."

"That's true," Sirius said. "We're a bit lost."

"And we're not 'hunters'," Harry added, uncertain if the man's refusal to open the door was due to that misconception.

"Huh," the man said, with a laugh that sounded like creaking wood. It ended in a raspy cough, and it was half a minute before he spoke again, "And yet you made it here? That must have been difficult. Yharnam has a special way of treating guests."

"Yeah, we were just attacked," Sirius said, frowning. "But we made it out alive, so all's well that ends well, I guess. Think you could let us in?"

Harry's eyebrows rose with incredulity. ' _All's well that ends well? That's a bit optimistic, isn't it?_ '

"Let in two outsiders?" The voice paused. "Well, I suppose it would be rude of me to refuse, since I'm just as much of an outsider myself. Though I should warn you that I'm sick."

"We won't be long," Sirius said and added, "And we'll be careful not to catch whatever you have."

"Ah, it won't spread to you. It isn't that kind of illness. Come in, then. The key is in the small hole above the doorframe. I'm afraid I have weakened too much to stand…"

Sirius retrieved the key and turned it in the keyhole. Harry was still on his guard, wand-hand raised and ready to fire off a hex. The door opened with a heavy slam that released a whirl of dust into the air. A cough tickled Harry's throat.

The man on the other side was skinny and stooped, and Harry suspected he looked older than he actually was. Slumped over himself, he reminded Harry of a marionette with cut strings. But he smiled faintly when they stepped over the threshold.

Harry's eyes flitted about the hallway as they approached the man. Red silken wallpaper was peeling off the walls and every piece of furniture he could see in the spotty light had a coating of dust. The furniture were all heavy wooden things, dark and at some point well-polished. Most of them met the hardwood floor on clawed paw feet.

It was like something out of a museum. ' _Exhibition one:_ _How people lived a hundred years ago, something like that,_ ' Harry thought. He'd had a similar feeling when he'd first stepped into Gryffindor dorms, but never this strongly. The Gryffindor dorms always had a sense of warmth and life to it, and this house lacked that entirely.

"I'm Gilbert," the man said, coughing weakly into a bony hand. "Who might you be?"

"Sirius and Harry, at your service," said Sirius and smiled winsomely. Harry nodded in greeting, his gaze trailing down to the wooden wheelchair that looked oversized cradling Gilbert's thin body.

"You must not have been here long," said Gilbert, looking Sirius over with a tired grimace. "Not many people around this cursed town still know how to smile…"

He invited them into his kitchen with a brittle, welcoming gesture that spoke of longtime exhaustion. They took a seat around his crooked kitchen table. Harry held back a grimace at the sight of dead, long-legged insects in the corners of the windows.

"We're not entirely sure of where we are," Sirius began and that was half a lie. They had no clue at all where they were.

"Never made it this far before? Central Yharnam, this is. One of the less… infested streets." Gilbert coughed again, the corners of his lips turning down as he spoke. "You two are brave to trot about during the night of the Hunt."

Harry leaned forward. What would be the point in pretending that he understood what the old man was talking about? They'd end up revealing their lack of knowledge sooner or later anyway. "Sorry, but where is Yharnam exactly?"

Gilbert squinted at him, eyes dark with a kind of disbelief that told Harry he'd probably just revealed himself to be a bit more of an outsider than Gilbert himself was. "In an old and terrible dream… a sick and festering Yharnam atop the Yharnam in the waking world."

The wind picked up outside the window, carrying with it mumbling whispers and far-away howls. Harry saw Sirius throw a tense glance at the stained glass and clutched his wand tighter. Refocusing on Gilbert, Harry said tried not to show any skepticism. That sounded like the sort of thing Trelawney would say, for Merlin's sake. ' _Soon he'll be predicting our deaths and waving crystal balls around_.' Harry cleared his throat. "Uh… right. We just dropped into this place, completely by accident, about an hour ago. Could you tell us what you know?"

"Huh… and here I was, thinking that you were looking to cure yourselves…" Gilbert leaned back in his wheelchair and began speaking.

-.-.-

Two hours later, Harry was curled up in the window with one of Gilbert's books, trying not to listen to the sound of the harsh wind outside. ' _It's no wonder he thinks this town is cursed_ ,' Harry thought and glanced over at where Gilbert and Sirius sat bent over an old map. ' _Maybe it is.'_

The people of Yharnam were sick with some strange beastly plague, according to Gilbert. Madness had taken even the ones yet untouched by this sickness, making them unable to distinguish between the infected and the clean. There were things in the shadows, Gilbert said, and whispers of occult rites being performed by the Healing Church that had once done so much good.

' _I've never even heard of a place called Yharnam. And though Gilbert clearly knows of England, his knowledge is a fair bit out of date, to say the least,_ ' Harry thought, resting his chin on his raised knees. ' _And this Healing Church seems kind of… dark_.'

Sirius had balked at Gilbert's descriptions of the Healing Church's "blood ministrations", as he called them, and the rumors that they could cure whatever ailed you. It seemed like a last hope for the hopeless, at least to Harry, more sad and desperate than immoral or corrupt. ' _Though Sirius did grow up in the darkest of families, so I can see where he's coming from. He knows how ugly it can get_.'

Harry looked down at the book again, rubbing a hand over his eyes. He'd been reading for a couple of hours now, scouring various texts for a way to get out of this horrid place. It was starting to feel like a lost cause. All the books focused on was the history of Yharnam and its Church. And what a strange and bloody history it was.

He turned to Gilbert, who was still leaning over the map with Sirius, and raised his voice. "This Vicar Laurence founded the Healing Church, right?" When Gilbert looked up with a nod, Harry continued, "And the basis of the Church was that this 'Old Blood' would let them-" He glanced down at the opened page in front of him, "- 'rise above humanity and grow into something greater'?'"

The words looked portentous on the yellowed page, but they sounded even worse when he read them out loud. Sirius was scowling, eyeing the book like he wanted to snatch it out of Harry's hands. And maybe burn it for good measure.

Gilbert nodded again. "Yes."

"But how did that lead to 'blood ministrations'?" It wasn't a line of questioning that would give answer to how to get back home, but Harry thought it might still be useful knowledge.

The book focused less on blood healing and more on some creatures called 'Great Ones'. Frankly, the reverential way they were referred to made the hairs on Harry's neck stand on end. The author seemed to think they were gods, or at least something very close to it. There was that feeling again, that something was very wrong, that something dark and deep and terrifying was just out of sight. Maybe this was it.

"Master Laurence found that the Old Blood could cure illnesses in humans, and so he shared it with the ailing masses of Yharnam." Gilbert looked a little wistful as he spoke, taking Laurence name in his mouth like a religious person would take a pope's, and Sirius stared at him like he wanted to be sick.

There was an apprehensive squirming in Harry's stomach as he turned Gilbert's words over in his head. ' _So they've all been drinking this weird blood?_ '

"Don't look so horrified. We got ours in the end. A punishment for our arrogance, I suppose." Gilbert folded his hands together in his lap, tightly enough to whiten his knuckles. "It's what caused the plague, you see. This terrible plague and this long Hunter's night. Master Laurence meant well, no doubt, but you have surely heard what they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions."

"That's what happens when you muck about with dark magic," Sirius said, voice hard and shot through with abject disgust. He drew his robe close about himself until it seemed to swallow him. It looked to Harry like he was trying to shield himself, maybe ward off Gilbert's words.

"Magic…? Perhaps. And certainly those who studied the Blood weren't always so careless with it. 'Fear the Old Blood' was a saying of theirs. Or so say the books, at any rate. It was long before my time." He sighed, long and low. "What those curious few scholars found in the Tomb of the Gods should have been left alone."

"How do we get out?" Sirius bit out, very brusquely. When Harry looked over, his hands were clasped tight around his chair's armrests.

"Out? Of this night?" Gilbert's thin lips curled up in to an incredulous smile. It had a strange, cruel slant to it that made Harry want to draw closer to his godfather in defense. "My friends, if you ever figure out how to accomplish such a thing, do be kind enough to return here to tell me."

Cold sweat crept along Harry's spine and he swallowed drily as he parsed that statement. "You mean – we're stuck here? There's no way out?"

"Unless you return the same way you came, then yes."

"Isn't there anybody in this forsaken town that might know a way out?" Sirius asked. He heaved himself out of the chair and began pacing over the ratty carpet, jittery with unfocused energy.

Gilbert gave a low, dismissive snort. But he seemed to catch himself before he could give an equally dismissive answer and his gaze turned downward for a moment. There was a look on his face like he was struggling to remember something. "…They do say the last Vicar remains in the Grand Cathedral. Dressed in white and ever praying."

He offered the information so reluctantly that Harry first thought he might be lying. But when Gilbert looked up again, his eyes were tired and his shoulders so sloped that Harry reconsidered. ' _Maybe he doesn't want us to go there, for some reason_.'

Sirius stopped his pacing. "And this Vicar knows -"

"It is your best chance, but I do not know for certain." Gilbert sounded like he regretted mentioning it at all. "The Vicars are more knowledgeable than anybody else here, but they are not necessarily accommodating."

"We'll get our answers, one way or other," said Sirius and the look on his face as he stared down at his wand gave Harry a brief flash of Bellatrix. He sometimes forgot that for all that Sirius was laid-back and as aligned with the light as could be, he was still a Black. When he glanced up and caught Harry's eyes, the intensity in his face thawed and was replaced by an easy smile. Harry thought it was probably meant to be comforting.

"How do we get to this Cathedral?" he asked and Gilbert sagged deeper into his wheelchair.

"Like I showed your friend. Through Cathedral Ward." He handed Sirius the map and then leant back to cough into his hand. Blackened mucous dribbled between his fingers and he wiped it away with the ease of old habit.

Sirius unrolled the map and traced a path over the paper with his index finger. "Alright. Let's go find this Vicar."

Gilbert grabbed Sirius' sleeve lightly. When he spoke, his voice was a croaky plea. "If - should you find a way out, please send a message. I grow so weary of this non-life, of the fear and the loneliness. Of this endless night."

When Sirius hesitated, Harry stepped forward. "We will. I promise."

* * *

 **A/N:** I'm not dead or on hiatus, just moving again. Still working on ES, no worries! Until then, have some HPxBloodborne? There just hasn't been enough gothic cosmic horror in my life lately.


	2. The Vicar Amelia

**The Long Night**

 _Chapter Two: The Vicar Amelia_

* * *

Every crooked statue and darkened building cast long shadows over the streets, and that alone would have made them eerie. But the people were what made this town its own miniature hell. If they could actually be called people.

There was the same kind of mad person they'd first encountered and subdued, not always travelling alone, but each time just as violent and insensate. They grunted like animals and only rarely could any actual word be made out. Most carried torches, casting the streets they moved through in flickering light. These were the ones who were clean of the plague but mad in that other way that Gilbert had described. Who looked about themselves and saw monsters in every other face they passed.

But they were not the only ones out in the night.

This was nothing like the fight in the ministry. Harry's heart was so far up into his throat he thought it might leap into his mouth at any moment. His pulse hammered in his jugular like it was trying to beat bruises into his flesh.

"What the hell are these – things?" he gasped breathlessly as he threw a shield up to avoid being clawed to death by a man with an oversized, snarling wolf's head. The yellowed fangs were bared in a rictus grin that never faltered, no matter how he snapped his jaws at Harry's shield. The shield charm held, though the man-beast splattered it with discolored saliva as he roared in frenzied rage. "Shit – _Depulso!_ "

The man-beast went careening down the long staircase they'd made it to the top of, screeching in a way no real wolf could or would have, and Harry took a trembling step back and tried to catch his breath. His shield was faltering, growing more transparent as Harry's arm shook with exhaustion.

"The infected, I think," Sirius grunted, his voice a grim whisper. His wand swept across the street and shards of ice followed its path in the air, stopping the people below from following them. "Gilbert could have mentioned that they'd be like this. I thought 'beastly' was meant metaphorically."

Harry could only agree as he stared wide-eyed down the stairs where the beast-man was turning away from them, apparently losing interest as soon as they were out of sight. Professor Lupin had never been this deformed in his werewolf form. These people-creatures… they looked ill. Some with dripping snouts, some with blinded eyes and all attacking with a sort of immediate, mindless fury that Harry had never seen in any creature or human before. Like they didn't know what they were doing - like sharks scenting blood in the water and lashing out.

' _How far have we made it these past four hours?_ ' Harry thought, rubbing the sweat from his temples with the edge of his sleeve. ' _Can't be more than half a kilometer at most_.' The streets and alleys were so labyrinthine and badly lit that it was difficult to keep track of how far their frantic fighting and running had taken them. A broom would have made everything so much easier.

' _Though who knows? The air could be full of deformed bird-people or something, just waiting to swoop down from the rooftops…_ ' Harry thought and stumbled back another step over cracked cobblestone. He cast _Tergeo_ on himself, but the deep stains in his clothes didn't completely disappear. Though at least it removed the sweat that had been dripping into his eyes. To his left was another one of those abandoned coffins that seemed to be everywhere in the city.

"It shouldn't be too far now - " Sirius said, casting a cleaning charm of his own over himself. He was visibly less tired, but that wasn't saying much when Harry felt like he was one more frenzied mob from collapsing.

They escaped through a dark alley, riding down a ladder to a roof with slippery, cracked tiles. There were sounds of fighting coming from below, but up here there was nothing jumping out to attack them. ' _No deformed bird-people.'_ Harry caught his breath and pressed a hand to his chest, trying to force his heart to slow down. "You get the feeling that our spells don't do as much damage as they should?"

Sirius plunked down on the roof with a heavy sigh and waved his wand over his bad knee. "Not on the crazy humans, but definitely on those turned into beasts. And the less humanoid monsters."

"I sent a cutting curse at one of those crow… _things_ … and it should have cut it in two." Harry hunkered down at Sirius side, waving another cleaning spell over himself. Now that the rush of adrenaline was fading, he realized he was bleeding in several places. Funny, he hadn't felt it at all during any of their fights. His _Episkey_ was getting better, at least, so that was something.

"Gilbert could have mentioned all the monsters running about," Sirius mumbled, though he looked less annoyed and more disturbed. The massive crows Harry mentioned lay in wait, always grouped together in a murder, and the moment you got a bit too close they attacked all at once.

Harry looked down over the edge of the roof and there was another one of those starved, rabid dogs that were running all over the damn town. He would have pitied them, but they were more terrifying than pitiable. They snarled sounded too deep for their thin bodies and they attacked with a viciousness their atrophied muscles shouldn't have allowed.

Further away, one of those troll-like creatures lumbered slowly behind a building with small traceried windows and disappeared from sight. Harry looked away, squinting up at the rooftops around them. All were dirty with mud and blood and who knew what else. The wind whooshed between two slim towers, carrying with it a high-pitched howl that made the dog down below bark and snarl and slaver like mad. ' _Everybody's mad here, except me and Sirius. It's a damn parade of the mad and the bad and the broken._ '

"I wonder what's really in these bottles everybody's keeping in their pockets," Sirius mused, having tended to his own wounds. It was a facetious question, so Harry didn't bother answering. Sirius held up the glass bottle and the red liquid within sloshed against the sides. It should probably have turned viscous by now, but perhaps whatever dark taint that was in everything in this place kept it from coagulating. Just as it kept the sun from either setting or rising, suspending it in the sky like a disk of red nailed to a wall.

"How much further?" Harry asked. He'd have asked to look at the map, but there wasn't enough light in this particular nook of the roof and casting a bluebell spell was an unnecessary risk to take.

"Through there, if I read it correctly," Sirius said, pocketing the bottle and pointing at an enormous segmented stairway ahead and to their right. It had the same ornamental stone handrails that all the stairs in this town seemed to have and was topped by more of those leering gargoyles. At the very bottom of the stairs was a limping figure with a wide-brimmed hat, stalking back and forth with a staff in one hand and a lantern in the other.

"There's one of those dead-looking giants," Harry murmured, cursing eloquently in his mind as he watched the creature move slowly down the stairs. They were huge skeletal things that loomed over every other creature around, with corpse-like skin and roughly-hewn capes draped over their shoulders. The bells they had tied around their necks made it easy to tell when they were near, at least, but avoiding them was another matter. Like all the other monstrous things, they were so aggressive that if you breathed in their direction they came charging at you.

Sirius huffed out a breath between clenched teeth. "Alright. We don't have much choice, but that doesn't mean we need to get close." He turned and waved his wand in Harry's direction and the third invigorating charm Sirius had spelled him with today put a little life back into his limbs. The rush was a familiar friend, but it was starting to make him feel sort of feverish.

' _I don't really want to know how often that spell can safely be used_ ,' Harry thought as Sirius performed the same charm on himself. What he said instead was, "We need to get a little closer, though. My aim is pretty good, but those thick handrails are in the way…"

Sirius nodded and put his hand on Harry's shoulder, squeezing reassuringly before he Apparated them to a low wall much closer to the stairs. Sirius wheezed alarmingly as they landed and Harry had to grab his arm to keep him from toppling over. He'd been Apparating them around a lot today and though Sirius hadn't said anything, Harry had a feeling that Apparating in Yharnam wasn't at all like Apparating back home. The cloying dusty air, the orange-red light from this never-ending dusk and that feeling that never got any weaker – that there was something amiss with the fabric of this world, this town, this _wherever_ they were.

"I'll go for the giant, you take the man -" Sirius said but before Harry could voice agreement or dissent, a streak of yellow light stole his attention. It was pure instinct to throw up another _Protego,_ his lips forming the words without conscious input from his brain. And fortunate that, because hidden behind the guardrail further up the stairs was another man. And this one had some kind of rifle in his hand.

More bullets pinged against his shield. They couldn't attack through the shield, but _damn it_ , the giant was slowly turning around and taking notice of them. Sirius whispered in his ear to let the shield go for a second, and there wasn't much choice, because the giant was ambling their way with his bell clinking against his bony chest-

Harry let the shield go and heard the sharp whistle of a bullet passing by his ear. Then Sirius' hex punched the rifleman over the rail and into the wall on the other side of the stairway. Harry grit his teeth, gaze turning to the giant, and he turned the wand in an angled pattern high above his head. " _Diffindo_!"

Pale green light cut a gouge into the giant's head and made one of its empty eye sockets weep fluid. The sight made Harry's gorge rise, but he'd seen a hundred such sights in the past few hours, and so it didn't slow him down. It wasn't really a person, this creature. Not _really_. It was a dead hulking mass, probably infected with the plague and mindless. He definitely wasn't making up excuses for himself.

" _Diffindo_!" he bit out again, and another cut appeared in the giant's chest. The ribs stood out so starkly that instead of cutting through flesh, the cut bisected bone. All the bone on the left side of the giant's ribcage.

Sirius dodged staff-strikes and the pale light that emerged from the limping man's lantern, putting him down with a whip of fire. Perhaps "man" was too generous a word, for when he stumbled back, his face had the same kind of pale corpse-like features as the giant. His mouth opened and it was just a black hole without teeth or tongue, and Harry couldn't find it in himself to care that Sirius had just killed a person. He just wanted to go _home_. These creatures didn't even bleed when you cut them, for Merlin's sake.

With a third _Diffindo_ , the giant finally crashed into the ground and remained there. Its giant axe tumbled from its hand and stuck into a withered tree nearby. Harry's eyes flicked back and forth up the stairs, guard still up. It looked empty now, but it probably wasn't. They'd yet to be that lucky.

They cautiously made their way up the stairs, and of course there was another pale corpse-man with a fiery scythe waiting for them further up. They took him down together; another severing charm coupled with bludgeoning hex from Sirius left the man in a heap on the steps.

In the place of gargoyles, atop the handrails there were now eerie black statues of hooded figures holding lit lamps. The light they cast was so cloudy and yellow that it didn't offer much visibility, but it was better than traversing the stairs in the dark.

And of course there were two more corpselike men waiting at the top of the stairs right in front of the doors, dressed in black robes and carrying long, wooden implements they wielded like spears. More severing charms followed and when they were also in heaps on the floor, Harry put his head in his hands and tried to catch his breath again. Sweat was trickling down his temples and cheeks and briefly he just wanted to lie down and rest, just for a little while. It was a senseless thought, of course. Maybe the repeated invigoration spells were starting to turn his brains to mush.

"You okay?" Sirius asked, his eyes seeming even more sunken-in than usual. Like they were trying to disappear into his head. He was paler than usual too, so Harry nodded as briskly as he could and tried not to let the knot twisting his insides show on his face. If they ever made it back home he was going to have nightmares for the rest of his life, but the squelching sounds of flesh being torn open and the brittle cracking of breaking bones wouldn't feature in them nearly as much as the sheer overbearing atmosphere of this place.

"Yeah, 'course. This is the Grand Cathedral, right? So we're one step closer to home!" Harry tried for a smile and was rewarded with half a grin from his godfather. ' _If this Vicar is willing to answer, and if they actually do have some idea what might take us back, and if they're not as mad as everybody else here…_ '

The Cathedral's thick double doors were lit by two flickering torches in the hands of two other creepy statues with skinny arms and holey faces. At least the light from their torches actually lit up the area around them, casting the intricate reliefs in the door in light.

Sirius flicked his wand and the doors opened with a rattling sound. Somewhere above, bells tolled for them as they made their way in. There was a small, empty antechamber leading to yet another set of chairs. Candelabras were set out on low stone shelves along the walls but their light didn't reach the high, rib-vaulted ceiling. More holey-faced statues lined the stairs, tilting long spears over their heads as they walked slowly up the steps.

"You hear that?" Harry whispered as they ascended to the top. The hall they entered was buttressed by fat stone pillars on either side. The tiled stone floor was cracked and the whole place would have seemed abandoned if not for the enormous altar at the far end of the hall. There was a towering statue of a headless woman pouring water from a jar. Behind her, Harry spotted tree branches growing, perhaps from her back. And below her were other statues, hooded humanoids with thin arms raised in worship toward the female form above. Two dozen candles lit up the display and the light caught in the polished gold accents.

There was a woman's voice, murmuring something about thirsting for blood. Her voice was low and humming, like she was reciting to herself rather than speaking to somebody else. It took Harry a minute to spot her, because she was bent so low and small over the ground in front of the altar that she wasn't easily visible in the shadow.

"…She's speaking English, so that's something. I guess." Belying his flippant words, Sirius tilted his wand forward in the direction of the woman.

"She's dressed in white," Harry mumbled, though her clothing seemed to consist of dirty rags. He took a few more steps forward and called out to her. There was no answer, though her mumbled reciting turned into incomprehensible muttering. ' _Mad, of course_ ,' and he wasn't even surprised at that, though their one hope was unraveling in front of their eyes.

"Vicar?" Sirius called out, louder.

"…Let us pray, let us wish… to partake in communion -" She descended back into unintelligible muttering and Harry was about to call out to her again, because what else could he do, when that simmering feeling of _wrongness_ in the pit of his stomach suddenly became overpowering. Like feeling a tsunami coming without actually seeing it. The woman bent lower to the ground and murmured, "Our thirst for blood satiates us, soothes our fear…"

"Sirius – I think we should go -" Harry said, as she began making horrible choked sounds that slowly became hoarse shrieks. "I think we should – run -" He could barely get out a word more, because there was bile on the back of his tongue and a swooping sensation in his chest - a kind crunching in his head. It felt like something was trying to squirm its way in, like something terrible was about to come down on his head and hammer him into the ground – or, or devour him – unmake him –

The woman's shrieks became an inhuman roar on her next inhale. There was the sound of bone splintering, of flesh shredding itself. A geyser of dark blood sprayed the altar and the statue above, splattering over the candles and the polished gold, as the woman began transforming into – something. Something much, much worse than the creatures they'd faced outside.

She grew larger and larger and as her feet became bird's talons, Harry took a few uncertain steps back. His face felt clammy, tongue stuck drily to the roof of his mouth. "Sirius, we've got to – we have to go _now_ -" he got out, voice wavering and he wasn't too proud to admit his own terror. Sirius looked like he'd stopped breathing, staring vacantly at the creature the Vicar was becoming. Harry took him by the sleeve and dragged him backwards without ever taking his eyes of the monster ahead, as its roars seemed to shake the very foundations of the Cathedral. This was a different kind of beast. Whatever it was, it was much worse.

Harry threw a glance behind him and the muscles in his back jumped when he caught sight of the smoky barrier that blocked what should have been their way down the stairs. He tried a _Diffindo_ , he tried _Bombarda_ , he even tried _Alohomora_ in pure desperation. The smoke let the spells pass without even swirling around them. But it wouldn't even let him pass a hand through.

"I don't think that'll work," Sirius gritted out, and his voice was unusually slow and heavy. "It feels very strong and… dark. The _old_ kind of dark, the kind even my parents were wary of…"

So they had to fight. The monster turned around, a dog's snout wavering in the air under blindfolded eyes. From its head grew a set of dark antler behind small furry ears and it towered almost all the way up to the ceiling. As big as the basilisk, if not bigger. What had been white, tattered clothing had turned into some kind of wispy material that moved like tendrils of hair in the air, though the arms were wrapped in strips of what looked like bandages.

It – she? - struck the ground with a clawed hand bigger than a giant's and that sent a shockwave through the floor from the impact. She roared again and catapulted herself forwards in their direction, like she could see them despite her blindfold. Or perhaps she'd caught their scent.

" _Ascendio_!" Harry breathed as Sirius Apparated aside, and with a snap of his wand he was high up in the air. The beast roared again, swiping right with her enormous clawed hand and missing Sirius by an inch.

" _Baubillious_!" he shouted, still up in the air, and a streak of yellow lightning shot out of his wand and ripped into her head between her massive antlers. She shrieked again, but at least she had now lost track of Sirius, who dove behind a pillar.

Harry dropped down on the beast's back and the collision knocked the breath from his lungs. Where his palms touched her, there was something like a burning sensation. Except the burning was made of _wrongness_ , of _otherness_ and distracting enough that she managed to buck him from her back. Harry landed hard on the stone floor, sucking in a deep breath and hacking up bloody spittle. ' _There goes a rib, I think_ ,' he had time to think before the beastly Vicar turned on him again and he had to dodge to the side. For such a large creature, she was surprisingly quick.

Sirius flicked his wand and out came a purple light that tore a gouge into the beast's left arm. Blood leapt from her flesh, though Harry couldn't see the wound for all the raggedy bandages wrapped around her arm. Her hands came together as if in prayer, raised to her face, and then beat down so hard on the ground that it rattled with the force of it. Harry's teeth clicked together and he stumbled back a step.

" _Bombarda_!" It should have blown her skull apart, or at least her face, but what it did instead was punch her backwards. She staggered for a moment and Harry saw blood pool behind her blindfold. Before he could take a breath, she lashed out with a clawed hand and swiped it over the floor. Close call. Sparks cascaded over him as he dodged and caught in his shirt, like the floor was made of flint.

"Harry, move!" yelled Sirius from somewhere behind her and then great chains wrapped themselves about the beast's neck. Harry threw himself across the floor, skidding behind a pillar. There was blood in his throat and it pushed itself up over his tongue when he tried to swallow. ' _No time for that now_ ,' he thought, hand pushed against the broken rib.

The floor rumbled again as the Vicar tried to break the chains. She threw herself back and forth with such force that one of the pillars on the other side collapsed when she slammed into it. The thundering booming of stone colliding with stone hid the sound of Harry's next spell. " _Confringo_!" he bit out. A roaring flame erupted from his wand and bit into the beast's side. There was a terrible crunching sound as her shoulder collapsed in on itself, but she shrieked with more rage than pain.

Harry took off towards his godfather. Sirius lips were moving silently, and a jet of what looked like black water shot out the tip of his wand. It burned up the beast's back like acid, melting the hair-like filaments over her back and the flesh underneath.

"Physical attacks don't do any damage," Sirius called. The Vicar turned around and screamed in his direction. Maybe she understood human speech still. Sirius' voice wavered and Harry saw how his knee bent at an awkward angle. They had to finish this soon, but how? Their attacks weren't doing the amount of damage they should be doing. Harry pushed his own exhaustion back and snapped three Blasting Curses in quick succession at the beast's left arm. Her flesh blistered and crumpled like he'd poured boiling water on it, red and weeping liquid. Then her elbow collapsed under her, tipping her great body to the right. Her head hit the floor and she snarled in pain or anger. Harry's arms were trembling and all that really kept him going now was a fear-fueled adrenaline the likes of which he'd never experienced before. His heart pounded against his sternum from the inside.

Finally the beast righted herself, but instead of lashing out at Sirius again, she sat back on her haunches. She folded her hands together and Harry was prepared for her to beat them to the floor. Instead she was enveloped in a warm, smoky light. It glittered faintly as it rose towards the ceiling, lighting up the hall where she sat. ' _That's magic_ ,' Harry thought, eyes widening. ' _No way it's anything else._ '

And then he noticed that the red, skin was knitting itself back together. Her elbow righted itself. Harry sucked in a breath and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He cast _Deprimo_ silently, though his wand-arm trembled so badly he thought he might miss her. She howled as it punched into her gut, her ribs cracking and her stomach going unnaturally concave for a brief moment.

When Harry glanced at Sirius, he was waving his wand over his leg. Bandages erupted from the tip and snaked their way around his knee. " _Episkey_ ," murmured Harry tiredly, and hoped it would be enough.

And then a clawed hand slapped him across the hall. He slammed into the wall on the other side like a ragdoll. His vision went black and then he was suddenly on the floor, coughing so hard his lungs felt like they were cramping. Blood dribbled from his mouth as he tried to catch his breath and there was a hollow ringing in his ears.

"Sirius?" Harry mumbled, his jaw aching. Sirius was on the beast's head, hanging on to her antlers, and – his left leg was gone below the knee. The stump spurted blood down the side of the beast's face. Where he and Harry had stood before, the lower half of his leg lay bleeding on the floor.

The sight forced the last dregs of energy Harry had into his legs. He stumbled up and before he had even decided on a spell, a fiery rope sprouted from his wand. He lashed it like a whip and it wrapped around the Vicar's arm like a snake. Harry saw the flame burn her, saw how it ate into her arm, but his focus was entirely on his godfather.

He threw himself forwards and by how difficult it was to breathe, Harry suspected a few more of his ribs were now broken. ' _If he dies – after all this – after making it this far -_ ' Harry realized he was crying. At least he thought he was. Maybe it was just sweat. He pointed his wand at the beast and it sang with power. Fire tore out of it, and Harry didn't even know what spell he wanted to cast, he just knew what he wanted to happen – he only knew the fear trying to choke him into freezing in place –

The flames ate at her legs, burned the bandages away and revealed first skin and then warped, ugly flesh the color of grilled salmon. "Sirius? _Sirius!_ " Harry shouted as Sirius fell, limp and palce, to the ground. Harry lashed out with his wand again and the beast's head snapped back like she'd been punched. The fire should have gone out by now, but instead it was continuing to eat its way down up her body. She was screaming and snarling loudly enough to make the windows tremble.

' _Accio Sirius!_ ' Harry thought and Sirius came flying, blood trailing after him in a banner of red. ' _He's unconscious – what do I do? What the fuck am I supposed to do?_ ' Harry thought as he tried to put enough pressure on the bleeding stump to make it stop gushing blood. It wet his hands to his elbow and made the floor a gleaming, slippery mess. ' _Episkey! Episkey! EPISKEY!_ ' he thought and jabbed his wand at the open flesh where the leg had been ripped off. It made the bleeding slow, but did nothing to heal the wound.

Harry heaved a breath that had stuck in his throat and slashed his wand in the air. The beast shrieked when more flames came tearing through the air and enveloped her head. It wasn't proper, functional magic. It was all anger and fear and a sense of hopelessness he didn't want to admit to himself.

' _He's not – He won't make it_ ,' Harry realized and that realization squeezed his chest like an iron vice. Now he was probably definitely crying, which was stupid and useless when he had a monster to kill and an unconscious godfather to take care of. ' _A_ dying _godfather, you mean_ ,' said a voice in his head. It sounded like Snape, cruel and taunting.

He wished Hermione was here. And Ron. Or better yet, Dumbledore. But they weren't, and he'd be damned if there was nothing he could do. ' _I won't sit and watch him die -_ ' Harry thought, though the thought didn't miraculously make him remember any other healing spells. He stilled, an idea unfurling in the midst of desperation.

Because… hadn't Sirius kept one of those bottles of blood? One of those blood concoctions that were supposed to cure anything and everything? A few days ago, Harry would never have contemplated it. Force-feeding his godfather some sort of dark blood potion wasn't the Gryffindor thing to do. ' _But it is the only thing I can do,_ ' Harry thought to himself. Maybe he was making excuses for himself. Sirius might prefer dying over being saved by 'blood ministration', as Gilbert had called it. But if so, he could rage at Harry later.

The realization that Sirius was dying and what he had to do to save him had only taken a few seconds. The thoughts zipped past so quickly that he should probably have stopped to reconsider it before making the choice. He should have considered carefully the blood's addictive qualities, and what Gilbert had said about how it caused the plague. But he wasn't planning on doing this more than once. And just once couldn't cause much harm, could it? Could it?

Harry dug into his godfather's trouser pocket and his hand clenched around the small glass bottle therein. The smell of the liquid inside was so pungent that Harry nearly choked. He put the mouth of the bottle to Sirius lips anyway, not allowing himself to hesitate, and tipped the liquid into his godfather's slack mouth. The floor was starting to rumble again and Harry's shoulders tensed.

They had to move.

Sirius was much lighter than Harry had expected, though he'd known his godfather was underweight. ' _How much does one leg weigh, anyway?_ ' Harry thought irrelevantly, and wondered if the effects of long-term adrenaline highs included the urge to giggle inappropriately.

"Harry?" Sirius murmured, but Harry had to turn around and meet the oncoming claw. He threw up a shield that she sharpened her claws against, rumbling and snapping with her fangs. He dropped it and spelled more fire at her. He tried to make short work of her, but the strength of desperation had faded with his godfather's awakening, and his exhaustion was making his limbs move as though they were shackled to anvils. He whipped fire and threw blasting curses and she was weakening, but he might not last until she was weak enough to kill.

A curse whizzed past from behind him and hit her snout. Harry glanced back to see Sirius slumped against the pillar, wand-arm up. His godfather smiled half-heartedly and gestured at the healed stump. Fresh skin had grown over the bloodied mess. ' _Thank Merlin_ ,' Harry thought. This was it. The last strength either of them had to offer.

The wrongness the beast had brought with her was nearly gone, the air almost cleared of its scentless stench, and her bony chest was heaving low against the ground. Her enormous body was splattered with so much blood that the bandages were more red than white.

She roared when she finally went down. Harry slammed her back against the altar with another blasting curse and she wobbled in place before tipping forward to land heavily on her hands. She lifted her head for a moment, and it seemed to Harry like she was looking straight at him through her blindfold. Then she toppled over, her snout meeting the floor with a heavy thump. Her body fell a second later, careening into the ground with a sound loud enough to pass for an explosion.

And then her whole beast's body, the size of a basilisk, disappeared in a shower of blood. There one second and gone the next. Only a scattered pool of red remained, soaking into the stone floor and filling the air with a rusty odor.

Harry stared at the blood for a moment, wobbling in place. Did that mean she was dead? None of the creatures outside _disappeared_ when you killed them. But the oppressive wrongness was gone and that had to be a sign of her demise or departure. He turned back to his godfather, relieved and shaky. In a heartbeat, the adrenaline washed out of his body and he promptly collapsed on the floor.

His last thought before unconsciousness claimed him was that they'd killed a goddamn demon.

* * *

 **A/N:** I don't even enjoy writing this kind of drawn-out action scene, so what am I doing dedicating half a chapter to it? Ah, well. It had to be there for the changing of the moon.


	3. The Crow in the Clinic

**The Long Night**

 _Chapter Three: The Crow in the Clinic_

* * *

When he woke again, he was laid out on a soft surface. He heard the murmur of voices somewhere above him, but when he tried to take a quiet breath, a cough rattled through his chest. The voices quieted and Harry would have tried to move to defend himself, if he hadn't then recognized one of the voices as his godfather's.

"Harry?" called Sirius, and Harry opened his eyes to a squint at the sound of his name. Sirius was smiling at him, pale and tired-looking, seated in a wheelchair much too big for his frame. Leg very obviously gone, just below the knee. But very much alive.

"Where are we?" Harry asked, struggling to sit up. There was a small table beside his bed, and there lay his wand. He pocketed it, casting his gaze about the room in a quick sweep. ' _Some kind of infirmary?_ ' he thought, because what he'd first thought was a bed was actually some kind of simple gurney. It wasn't the only one in the room.

"In Iosefka's clinic," said a woman's voice, and out of the darkness in the far end of the room stepped a woman dressed in the strangest, most elaborate clothes Harry had yet to see in this cursed town. She had a mask shaped like a bird covering her face and a cloak the color of smoke wrapped around her body. "I thought you a Hunter, so I didn't object to the ministering of blood in your case."

Her heavy boots made the wooden floorboards creak as she stepped closer. Harry glanced up above his head, where what looked like two jars filled with blood hung from an IV-stand. "…Blood ministration?"

Sirius grimaced. "I was out cold, or I would have put a stop to that. They assured me that it wouldn't be dangerous to have it done just the once, though." He glanced up at the blood and though he didn't actually move, he seemed to shudder internally.

"The two of you are the only ones in this town not taking blood as a regular measure," said the woman with the bird mask. From her voice, she was probably around Sirius age, maybe even a bit older. "And after slaying poor, blood-mad Vicar Amelia, I should say you're the only ones who truly deserve it!" She laughed lowly to herself, though Harry didn't understand the source of her mirth.

"If we ever make it back, you and I are damn well going to learn healing spells," Sirius muttered quietly to Harry, who nodded. It was a miracle they'd made it as far as they had with only the bare-bones healing spells they knew. Hopefully, when they made it back, Madame Pomfrey could regrow Sirius' leg. Harry was sure he'd read that skilled Healers could regrow limbs. And certainly Sirius seemed more irritated than upset about being one leg shorter. His overt lack of concern calmed something in Harry. Though knowing his godfather, that lack of concern could just as easily be a mask of bravado.

"I do think that's enough blood for you, young man," said another woman coming through the doorway, walking with the brisk steps Harry associated with professional healers.

"So if you're not here for the night of the Hunt, what are you here for?"

"Eileen, it is really none of your business!" said the woman sharply. She turned to Harry and fluffed the pillow under his head gently. "My name is Iosefka, and this is my clinic. You have had a terrible time of it, as I hear! Though fruitful. And do not think that I am not thankful. It was a great service you did, though you had no obligations to us or our town," she said, and her voice was as sweet and soothing as rainwater.

"You're welcome. And thank you for – treating us," he said, though there was some apprehension at the thought of that infected blood running through his veins. "My name is Harry. I guess you already know Sirius?" he continued with a glance at his godfather.

"Indeed, and he's quite the charmer," said Iosefka with a glance at Sirius, who smiled wanly.

"Oh, do stop flirting like witless teenagers," said the woman called Eileen, crossing her arms over her chest. Her hands were covered by heavy leather gloves that creaked when she bent her fingers.

"You are ever so staid, my friend," Iosefka said with a sigh. She glanced over at Harry. "Though you should be glad Eileen came to your rescue! You might not have survived this night without her aid."

"Ah… thank you?" Harry hedged, and Eileen tilted her head at him in acknowledgement.

"Do not thank me for doing my duty, and granting me access to the first Vicar's skull besides. You are not Hunters driven mad by the hunt; you are not man-beasts to be put down, and you are not here to seek a cure to some unfortunate ailment. So answer me this: what are you here for?"

"I've already told you –" Sirius began, but the woman cut him off with a sharp gesture. Though Harry couldn't see her eyes, he could still feel the weight of her gaze resting on him. She had such presence, this masked woman. Sirius huffed but quieted, giving Harry a gesture he thought meant 'go ahead'.

"It was an accident. We were in a fight – somewhere else, nowhere near this cursed town, and then we were – I guess, transported here." It sounded so inelegant and improbable when he said it like that. But Eileen nodded.

"Your friend said something similar. I suppose he was telling the truth, after all."

Sirius bared his teeth at her, looking for a brief moment like his Animagus form given human shape. Iosefka huffed, but she made no comment.

"Well, I suppose we'll have to try helping you home. Though how to do that, I have no idea." Eileen sighed. "Insight, perhaps?" She cast her gaze to Iosefka, who shrugged.

"Can you hear the crying of the child?" asked Eileen, refocusing on Harry.

Harry blinked, confused. "What child?"

"Can you hear the singing, then?"

"Is this some kind of riddle?" Sirius asked, brows furrowed in obvious irritation. Iosefka shot him an apologetic smile, but didn't elaborate.

"What about the Church Doctors? White-garbed, corpse-faced and carrying lanterns… have you encountered them?"

"There was a man like that outside the Cathedral. With the giant…" Harry said and Eileen nodded in apparent satisfaction. "Uh, he was a doctor?"

"'Was' being the operative word in this case. As blood-mad as the rest of them." She shook her head, not seeming particularly concerned. "But his lantern, when you encountered him – did it spit bulbs of light at you?"

"Yeah?" said Sirius, and Harry had some vague memory of that too.

"You must have killed a respectable amount of beasts to have acquired that much insight," said Eileen.

"Or else we already had that much 'insight' before we even came here," said Sirius with a snort. He looked irritated, brushing off imaginary lint from his shoulder and slouching deeper into his wheelchair. He patted the empty space where his leg met an abrupt end, his brows drawing together.

"What kind of insight, exactly?" Harry asked.

"It allows you to see the world as it really is. As ordinary people cannot."

' _Well, wizards see more then muggles, I think… We can see through enchantments that block muggle sight. Maybe it's something like that?_ ' Harry thought, though he didn't voice the question out loud. Though they had a power all their own, the people of this town weren't wizards.

"That's very nice and all," said Sirius with a tone of voice that informed everyone exactly how 'nice' he thought it was. "But all we want is to get back home. We were in the middle of something when we ended up here, and there are people in need of our help back home."

"Gehrman's notes, perhaps?" murmured Iosefka.

"Perhaps." Eileen gave the impression that she was frowning, though her mouth couldn't be seen through the mask. "To the Workshop, then."

-.-.-.-

Sometime in the period Harry had been unconscious, night had fallen. Sirius had assured him that he hadn't even been out for an hour, but in that time the sun had fallen below the horizon and a bright white moon had taken its place.

Their small group moved through the area surrounding the great Cathedral, what Eileen called 'the Ward', and she led them through a building and across rounded stone walkways in a tower. Finally, balancing on rickety wooden bridges, they'd been able to jump their way down to the nook that hid the Workshop's door. Or in Sirius case, float his wheelchair down with the help of magic. Why the door was so inaccessible, way down inside an old tower, Harry couldn't guess at.

The 'Workshop', as Eileen called it, appeared very deserted and unused to Harry's eyes. Its interior looked as though a hurricane had whipped through it. Or like somebody had left in a hurry. The floorboards were upended and books and yellowed papers lay scattered about. Ratty curtains hung on either sides of a statue at the far end wall and in a corner, a doll with a ruffled skirt spread about its porcelain legs was seated. What caught the eye most keenly, however, was the altar in the middle of the room.

"What are we looking for?" Sirius asked finally, when Eileen seemed content simply to sweep her gaze over the scene.

"We need to look through his notes," said Eileen. "He was a very knowledgeable man, never close to falling into the blood-mania even in his Hunter's days." She sounded approving. "Never any need for a Hunter of Hunters to go after him, oh no."

While Eileen scanned the yellowed papers scattered over the floor, Sirius wheeled over to the closest bookshelf and began sorting through the books. With the help of magic, that was less of a task than it otherwise would have been.

Harry snuck a glance at the altar. There was something about it. It didn't look any more or less creepy than anything else in this town; a couple of unlit candles and a smattering of discarded books. But there was something… off. About the one open book in the middle.

He drifted over. It was like when he heard Voldemort through his nightmares sometimes, those ears on the inside that let him listen in on Nagini's attacks half a country away. It was with that same sense, those internal ears, that heard something from the book. ' _A voice…?_ '

He took a step closer. It wasn't like Voldemort's cold, ugly voice. This was a deep hum of a voice, androgynous or multi-gendered, singing a song without words. It sounded like an ocean, maybe, or perhaps a choir. Or a storm with thunder rolling in.

Harry reached out and the voice reached back. A pale yellow flame curled up from the book's opened pages - and there, immediately, was that sense of wrongness he'd felt when the Vicar had transformed. Something slick and horrible and - _wonderful_ was trying to squirm into him, into his head through his ears. Harry picked the withered, curled thing in the middle of that yellow flame and held it in his hands. It sang to him so sweetly, so dreadfully. It was a lullaby; it was a dirge.

Harry put it carefully in his pocket. It didn't belong there, but what he wanted to do with it – what it wanted him to do – he wasn't sure. ' _It's probably some dark artefact_ ,' Harry thought, feeling a little dizzy, like the world was spinning too quickly on its axis. ' _It's probably some horrible cursed thing_.' But it didn't feel dark in that way, like how the beastly Vicar had felt. She hadn't sung to him with her otherness, with her _wrongness_. This thing, this little helpless thing, had such a sympathetic voice.

' _I'll decide later_ ,' Harry thought, shaking the cobwebs from his mind and taking a deep breath. As he let it out, he focused on the book from where the little flame had sprung.

 _It's in the babes, or of the babes. What have we done? And what for? This endless night. This endless Hunt. The Paleblood curse is a fair enough consequence for what our pride has wrought. We should have left the sea alone, we should have let our curiosity rest. This nightmare is without end…_

There was such a desperate sense of grief in the words, though Harry had no idea what the writer meant. ' _And it doesn't get us any closer to answers about how to escape Yharnam_.'

"I've got something," said Sirius suddenly, and Harry was jerked out of his musings. Sirius straightened and turned the chair to face him and Eileen, a thin book clasped in his hand hand. He read out loud, "'Of those few of us not left to the madness of the nightmare, I alone can help the Hunters to the Yharnam sunrise again. I alone can help them back into the waking world.'"

Eileen snorted. "That's something. Or it would have been, if Gehrman was still around."

"He's dead?" asked Harry and forcefully wrestled his own growing hope down. Eileen glanced his way for a moment, then huffed out a breath.

"He dwells in the Dream, and the Dream is for Hunters alone."

"Can you dream about him and ask how to get out of here, then?" said Sirius with a tired scowl. Eileen chuckled.

"That is not how it works. But yes, I can ask." She quieted. "The Doll might know…" she murmured, seemingly to herself.

Sirius looked further annoyed. "…So we'll meet back at Iosefka's clinic after you've spoken with this Gehrman."

Eileen nodded, though the movement was unenthusiastic. "Be careful. It's quite the mess you've gotten yourselves caught up in. And tonight of all nights."

* * *

 **A/N:** I like Eileen, and it was fun to write her. This chapter is on the shorter side, but I consider this to be the end of the 'introduction arc'. Tell me your thoughts? I love Bloodborne's atmosphere and I really wanted to get it right.


	4. Dark Water

**The Long Night**

 _Chapter 4: Dark Water_

* * *

Getting back to Iosefka's clinic took a lot longer than either of them probably expected. The mobs in Cathedral Ward led them astray and had them dodging into alleys as they tried to navigate their way back, while the moon above warped the shadows into queer shapes that seemed to reach for them as they passed.

Eventually, the buildings and streets around them turned into deep woods with skeletal trees shrouded in mist. Lanterns were set up along the trampled pathways through the trees and cast their eerie glow over granite humanoid forms with mouths open in silent screams. As though Medusa had passed through here and left these victims in her wake.

"What the hell are these fucking insect people?" Sirius snarled quietly as the creature they'd been facing finally collapsed to the ground, its spindly arms and legs akimbo. These creatures had human bodies, but their oversized heads were that of a rotting, oversized fly with too many eyes to count.

The made it a few more minutes before another creature appeared behind a tree. Same humanoid body, pale and thin, but when Sirius was a second too slow to move his chair, what looked like a giant snail materialized from the top of his head and attached itself to Sirius scalp. Harry hurled a Cutting Curse at the creature's back and Sirius took advantage of its distraction to turn into his Animagus form and limp away.

"You okay?" Harry asked, dodging the creature's spray of glowing white light. It hit the ground at his feet, eating through the hard-packed soil like acid. Sirius swayed where he stood, one dirty paw over his eyes, and then Harry had to turn away as the creature charged again. With a sharp slash of his wand, he sent it careening into a tree half a yard away. ' _Doesn't seem to be getting back up_ ,' Harry thought, wilting a little in pure relief.

"Fuckin' – hurt -" Sirius mumbled, back in human form. When Harry tried to pull his hands from his head, he groaned in pain.

"Let me see," Harry said and when he finally managed to pry Sirius' hands away, his godfather's pupils were so wide the iris seemed to have disappeared. Harry spotted no injuries, but it could easily be something internal. ' _And it probably is_.'

"Stay here," Harry said, helping Sirius lean against a gnarled tree that should hide him from anything else that might come skulking through the night. A flight of stairs at woods' edge were leading down to where Harry could hear the sound of waves slapping against stone, and he sprinted down the cracked steps with his wand raised preemptively. ' _I know I saw -_ ' There. A door. Relatively unharmed, even. And for once not surrounded by any twisted beasts. At the bottom of the stairs was a wide stone platform that reached the edge of the waves he'd heard before. A reflection of the moon glittered in the sea beyond, and Harry caught a glimpse of the horizon. So far away, a straight line unbroken by either other islands or by ships. Like the sea was endless. Maybe in this world, it was.

Harry knocked on the door, listening for voices or inhuman howls. When only silence greeted him, he cast _Alohomora_ on the lock. It clicked open and he was about to take a step in when something screeched behind him. Harry twitched hard at the sound, almost dropping his wand.

" _Ascendio_!" The spell pushed Harry back over the platform and he landed clumsily on his knees. His gaze jerked to the stone steps and there was Sirius, bent over and clutching his head. Another one of those creatures lay dead at his feet. Sirius' one leg was trembling and the stump twitched wildly. He looked half a breath away from collapsing.

With a spell his godfather had taught him not two hours ago, Harry put him to sleep. ' _Goddamn. Merlin. Fuck._ ' His heart remained in his throat, thumping wildly before settling into an uneasy rhythm.

' _This world seems to be affecting him more than me_ ,' Harry thought briefly, unsurely. He levitated Sirius back down and pushed him through opened door.

Like it had been lying in wait, a giant rat leapt out of a shadow. Harry grit his teeth and dropped Sirius where he stood. The rat looked like it was carrying some kind of plague, eyes rolling wildly and froth gathering in the corners of its oversized mouth. It shrieked like a baby in pain when Harry felled it, and that was somehow the worst part. ' _This damn_ wrongness,' he thought vaguely.

Harry glanced over the room quickly. Nothing else leapt out at him and he forced himself to relax a smidge. His head was pounding, and though he hadn't had much opportunity to try alcohol beyond what the Weasley twins had managed to sneak into Gryffindor tower, what he really wanted right now was a drink.

As was usual, the room was dusty and a hundred years out of date. A dirty armchair stood in a corner, and that would have to do for now. " _Tergeo_." Harry levitated Sirius, sans wheelchair, into the now much less dirty armchair and tried to think. They had to get back to the clinic. Sirius had a spell that showed roughly in what direction they had to move, but Harry didn't know the incantation.

The wind carried cackling laughter in through the closed door and Harry put his head in his hands. Screw getting back to the clinic, if Sirius hadn't been down and out he would have settled for a few hours' worth of peaceful rest. He heard Hermione's voice in the back of his mind, admonishing him about the importance of sleep and rest. ' _Imaginary Hermione has a point_ ,' Harry thought as he rubbed his temples. He sat down on a nearby table and stretched out his legs.

Half an hour later, Sirius woke. "My head feels like it's going to explode," he murmured. He looked, if anything, even more in need of rest than Harry felt. Perhaps being spelled to sleep wasn't the same as actually sleeping. "Where are we?"

"Ducked in through a nearby door a while ago," Harry said, combing debris out of his hair with his fingers. "We need to continue up to the right, I think."

Sirius smiled thinly, heaving himself upright in the armchair. "We also need to – not die, preferably."

Harry hesitated for a moment. "Is the leg bothering you?" He tried to be careful, to show some _decorum_ , as Hermione would put it. But Sirius was supposed to have been a great duelist, so he had to ask. "Or… Azkaban really took a toll, didn't it?"

Sirius stilled so suddenly it almost looked like a flinch. Then he relaxed again, but even in the dim light, Harry could tell it wasn't natural. "Yeah. I guess it did." He shrugged gracefully.

Despite the flippant gesture, it was like he'd slammed a door shut in front of the subject and locked it. Harry was not the most observant person, but he wasn't so dense that he couldn't recognize a sore point. Casting about for something else to say, Harry pointed to an old bookshelf. "Looks well-stocked. I'll see if there is any information that may be of use." Not the most elegant of redirections, but Sirius immediately looked less stiff.

It was more ramblings about the Great Ones, which Harry had expected. Sirius needed to rest, but Harry doubted that his godfather would want to hear that right now. And they didn't really have time to wait around much longer. _'All this gloomy blathering about newborns and blessed wombs and moon rituals… I have a feeling Voldemort would have been interested in this world_.'

"Anything useful?" Sirius asked a few minutes later. He'd regained a little color and slung his leg over an armrest.

"No, just more talk about rituals and moon phases and communing with Great Ones." Harry snapped the book shut with a thump. Sirius' nose crinkled in a grimace of disgust or disapproval.

"My mother had books on sacrificial moon rites," he muttered. "If she'd been born here she would undoubtedly have worshipped these 'Great Ones'. Anything for power, the Darker the better."

They sat in uneasy silence after that, but for the rattling of the windows when the wind pressed in. Finally Sirius started weaving a spell over his stump, and as Harry watched, the vague outline of a leg appeared in the air under his knee. It was wooden and not exactly a work of art, but as he attached it to the stump, Sirius seemed satisfied.

"Let's move on," said Harry finally, when Sirius didn't seem inclined to elaborate on what he'd just done. Sirius looked up and nodded briskly, looking like he'd briefly forgotten that they had somewhere to be. He was limping, but the wooden leg held his body upright. And it was better than constantly wasting magic on floating a chair around.

They made their way out and continued on along the side of the building, where the stone platform turned into a narrower walkway. The cold air bit at Harry's cheeks and he hitched up his shoulders against the howling wind. Ivy climbed up over the mortar foundation of the massive building to their right and reached for the dirty windows. Iron streetlights cast a flickering orange light over them as they passed, but Harry still had to squint to make out what was coming up ahead. There was a bridge or some kind of deck up above, but no easy way to reach it. More vines hung from beneath the thick stone piers that supported the bridge, trembling in the wind.

"Enemy ahead," Sirius called quietly and Harry stopped looking above to raise his wand against a humanoid creature with an engorged multi-eyed head and extra limbs sprouting from its back. Its jelly-like eyes gleamed pus-yellow and it lashed at them with spindly arms. Sirius put it down with a sharp slash of his wand. Its body twitched violently, tottering backwards and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap.

"There's something more back there," Harry whispered and pointed out a larger silhouette framed in a stone arch half a yard away.

Some kind of long limb lashed out from the stone arch and in its wake a ball of fire ripped through the air, briefly illuminating everything in its path. Sirius dodged left, Harry dodged right and though he still couldn't see exactly what they were fighting, he cast _Deprimo_ in the direction of the thing and preemptively dodged away again.

"It's a scorpion, I think," called Sirius from a few steps ahead, panting. The prosthetic leg stuck out at an angle before he reached down and corrected it. "A scorpion with a damn _flower_ instead of a stinger -"

And tons of teeth. Dirty, sharp teeth set in a vertical mouth along the creature's whole midsection. It leaked a bright fluid that smelled like raw sewage and Harry flicked his wand and catapulted the thing into the wide staircase at the far end of the walkway. It crumbled into itself in a swirl of glittering blue matter that made Harry's head spin. It looked like _space_ , which was a strange thought to have. ' _Space and a smattering of stars_.' Harry rubbed his forehead, trying to dislodge the sudden vertigo.

A spot of light in the corner of his eye caught his gaze not a moment later. Sirius was bent over it, casting what Harry recognized as diagnostic charms. The thing was close to the water's edge and the spell-light glittered on the waves.

"What's that?"

"I'm not sure."

"I think there was a light like that over a book in the Workshop," Harry said. It was the same kind of flame, small and yellow. But this one didn't sing to him, didn't murmur sweet nothings into his ears and try to squirm inside.

"It's not a curse," Sirius said with a frown. Harry crouched down beside him, the salty wind ruffling his hair and biting his cheeks. "I don't even think it's Dark. But whatever it is, it registers as powerful."

"Let's not leave it here, then," Harry said, glancing out at the water uneasily. He had no doubt this great sea was filled with creatures that could give him nightmares for years to come. He flicked his wand over the flame to seal it in a bubble, but as soon as the spell enveloped it, it disappeared. The image of an opened skull flickered behind Harry's eyelids and he stumbled back. There was a light flowing from where the skull opened, bright and melodious and glittering.

"You alright?" Sirius asked, hand on his shoulder to steady him. "It didn't hurt you?"

"No – I – there was just a sense of – something falling away…" Harry shook his head rapidly. Sirius waved his wand over Harry's head for several minutes, until he was apparently satisfied that he was completely unharmed.

"Well, it doesn't seem to have done anything to hurt you. At least nothing that can be detected with magic," Sirius said, frowning. "Our kind of magic, anyway."

"I feel fine," said Harry, which was only half a lie. A part of him wanted to worry, but a stronger part wanted to get back to the clinic. The night was so long that he'd completely lost track of time. How long had they really been in this strange world? A full twenty-four hours? Forty-eight hours? It could be less than that, or even more. The moon was a static disk in the sky, bright white and gleaming like a polished plate.

The walkway ended abruptly, more bodies strewn about the cracked stone ground at the end of the wide flight of stairs. The black weeds that seemed to grow absolutely everywhere almost tripped him on the way up, nestled more thickly here than he'd seen before.

"There is a gate over there," said Sirius and Harry nodded. The gate was sitting underneath an arch supported by blocky pillars. Vines clustered over the ground at the gate's threshold, climbing laboriously up the leftmost pillar. There was another lever by its side, but before he could pull it, he noticed an open door in the building to the right.

' _I'm pretty sure this is all just one_ enormous _building_ ,' Harry thought as he peered into the darkened doorway. Somewhere inside he spotted what looked like the faint outline of a staircase, climbing upwards and curving to the left. There were usually less hostile creatures inside the buildings, at least the ones with closed doors, so it was tempting to veer off into the doorway.

Something moved in there. Coming straight for them. Harry backed up and glanced at his godfather, wand raised again. "Uh, Sirius?"

Her white robes flapped about her feet as she ran. On her head, covering her face, was a black cap with two tips that curled back like ram's horns. It gave the impression of a blindfold, though the lack of visibility didn't seem to bother her at all.

"I see her." Sirius swung his wand back like he was holding a whip. A Blasting curse knocked into the woman and sent her crashing through the darkness and from the sound of it, through a window. "Let's try going up. I want a better view of the area before we continue."

Harry frowned. "There might be more of those people still inside."

"Yeah, but they're not as difficult to deal with as the monsters. _Lumos_." Sirius stepped in through the door with his wand lit bright as a beacon. Harry stayed on his heels, though privately he thought he'd rather fight the creatures than humans. Killing monsters was one thing, but killing humans… if they were still human, that was to say… There was a sick feeling in his stomach at that idea.

As they entered what appeared to be some kind of enormous library, Harry was struck by the thought that Sirius perhaps thought every person "tainted" by the Dark should be put down. Perhaps that was what his upbringing had taught him. Not sure how to feel about that notion, he waved it away.

As in all buildings they'd entered in Yharnam, there was an atmosphere of desertion in the hall. Dust covered everything and books were strewn all about the floor. Three red leather sofas had been placed awkwardly in the middle of the room. Perhaps, a long time ago, students had been seated for study in those sofas. In various nooks and crannies stood circular shelves packed with collections of big jars. Most were covered, but Harry spotted one that had toppled over. From its mouth, dozens of eyeballs had rolled out over the floor. Silently and on the inside, Harry cringed.

Candles perched on the bookshelves lit the room just enough to give it an unnerving glow. The spiral staircase would have reminded Harry of Hogwarts, if some of the steps hadn't been stained by splotches of dark blood. The staircase towered over them, reaching for some floor up above. The light of Lumos didn't reach all the way up, and so it appeared as though the top of the stairs simply disappeared into darkness.

" _Homenum Revelio_ ," Harry murmured, just to be sure. The spell only revealed humans, of course, but it was better than nothing. He waited a moment. Nothing. ' _That's something, at least._ '

By wordless agreement, they started climbing the stairs. There was such a profound silence in the air that Harry couldn't keep his shoulders from tensing further. It had taken a while to get used to the screaming wind that seemed to reach everywhere out there, knocking on windows and doors and carrying with it nightmarish sounds. But now that he had gotten used to it, the silence felt unnatural. Like a trap.

The second floor was a mezzanine. It had probably been elegant, once upon a time. It was less messy up here, though just as dusty and empty. Heavy ornate bookshelves lined the walls in neat rows, and most of the books were still lining the shelves rather than scattered about the floor. A circular chandelier with a few candles still lit hung from the ceiling and cast light over the floor.

Sirius perused a shelf, pulling out books and single parchments and frowning. "' _When the red moon hangs low, the line between man and beast is blurred. And when the Great Ones descend, a womb will be blessed with child_ _,'"_ _he read aloud and the words seem to echo in the room. Or maybe that was just a feeling Harry had, racing up his spine like a premonition._

 _'_ _If Vicar Amelia was just a beast, what are these Great Ones?_ _'_

 _"There is a ladder over there, I think," said Sirius and pointed over at the other end of the mezzanine. Harry squinted, trying to make out the shape in the dim light and then made a noise of recognition. It was a solid iron thing, reaching up towards a third floor._

He peered around the area. "Wait, there is a door over there..." he said. Three stone steps led up to another set of double-doors on the other end of the mezzanine. Harry pointed his wand at the door and thought, _Homenem Revelio._

Sirius frowned. "I still want to get up to the top floor and get an overview of the area outside."

"There is someone on the other side," Harry said, glancing warily at the door. "They're human. And not moving."

Sirius snorted. "That doesn't mean much."

"Maybe not. But maybe it'll be someone who knows this area. Or just a sane person, like Eileen." Harry was trying for a hopeful tone, but even to his own ears he sounded like he doubted the words coming out of his mouth. "It couldn't hurt to have another Hunter as backup?"

"Yeah. But no more side-tracking after this, though." Sirius rubbed his eyes. "I don't like wandering around at random in this damned place." He said 'damned' like he really did mean _damned_. Cursed, condemned, infernal. It probably was, Harry thought.

Sirius pushed the doors open with one great heave. They opened smoothly and quietly, despite the dust that had gathered over the puckered wooden surface. Cold air, tasting faintly of salt, rushed in and chased away the musty smell of old books.

Harry's eyes caught immediately on the dark sky: up above hung the moon, larger from this angle and pale as winter. It washed the wide stone shelf beyond the threshold in bright light. The shelf, or platform, protruded from the building but ended abruptly in a descending stairway some twenty steps from the doors. It looked like half a bridge to Harry's eyes, or a balcony with an easy exit for the suicidal. There was a drop of tens of meters down to the restless waters somewhere below, and there was no fence around the perimeter of the ledge to keep the unwary from falling.

' _I think this is that platform I spotted down below_ ,' Harry thought. It was quieter up here, the air so still that the moment felt suspended in time.

On the right-hand side, precariously close to the edge, somebody was seated in a high-backed chair. They were turned toward the moon, the light bleaching all features from their face this far away. Harry saw an outline of a staff, with a crown that branched out like a small tree, just behind their shoulder.

"Do you see what I see?" Sirius asked quietly, drawing his wand and tilting it forward.

"He – or she – isn't moving," Harry said, though he too had his wand ready. He wasn't optimistic enough to expect anything but a threat.

"Probably just waiting for us to come a little closer."

They crept closer, and there was no reaction from what Harry could now identify as an old man. An old man wearing what looked like a metal blindfold, with a hunk of some dark organic material perched on his head like a hat.

' _Is he wearing a dress?_ ' Harry thought inanely before the man came properly into view. The man's clothes reminded him of that frilly robe Ron had gotten from his mother in fourth year. Very decorative, with flowing sleeves and covered by a silver and blue outer robe. Intricate patterns were sewn into the borders. ' _That weird hat doesn't fit with the rest of his clothes, but… he looks important. Or at least rich.'_

And he'd yet to attack them. Or move at all. If not for the faint rise of his chest, Harry would have mistaken him for a newly made corpse. A corpse with a solid blindfold.

"Hello?" Sirius tried carefully, though he looked on the verge of attacking the man despite his stillness. Perhaps that would have been the better option, but Harry was still sort of relieved that his godfather didn't go straight for the kill.

"Ahh… Aa..." the man wheezed and the faint sound almost made Harry jump. He picked up his long staff and with the crown, he pointed out at the stairway. Or perhaps the water beyond? Or else the moon. He clearly couldn't see where he was pointing.

"Who are you?" Sirius asked, leaning into the old man's space. More wordless wheezing and pointing with the staff. Perhaps he couldn't speak. He didn't seem concerned with their presence, which was a tad strange. Then again, all the people here were at least half-way mad. Most were fully mad, even.

"Who are you?" Sirius asked again, sharper now. When he received no answer, he pointed at the man's chest. For a brief second Harry thought his godfather meant to kill him, even though he had no real cause to. But then: " _Legilimens_!"

Sirius expression changed from confusion to horror to fear so quickly that Harry didn't have time to react. And then he opened his mouth and _screamed_.

"Sirius!" Harry knocked the wand out of his hand and Sirius heaved a giant breath, stumbling back and gazing sightlessly into the air. His face was the color of curdled cream.

"Oh – Oh, _fuck_ ," Sirius mumbled and sat down heavily on the ground. "Harry? Harry!"

"I'm here, Sirius," Harry said. His godfather looked about himself blearily, too disoriented to notice how close Harry stood.

"They're not trying to summon those Great Ones, they've already succeeded!" Sirius rambled, even as Harry's insides turned to ice. "They've turned humans into those things, those monsters – they want to make _themselves_ into that – they want to make all of us into those things -"

"Sirius, calm down. I'm listening, I believe you, but if you don't calm down one of those creatures might hear you." This didn't look like normal disorientation. Sirius eyes were wild and there was a horrible energy in him suddenly, like he'd been zapped by lightning. ' _What was in that old man's mind?_ ' Harry wondered, and shuddered. Sirius had never seemed truly scared before, even when he was weak.

Sirius pressed his hands into his eyes, hard enough that it looked painful. "His name - Willem - his mind is full of – I don't even know what it is. It's like it's in a language I can't decipher, even though I _know_ it's English. He was going to 'ascend' by 'lining his brains with eyes'." Sirius coughed out a breath. "Oh, Merlin. Just touching his mind felt like dipping into a vat of acid."

"Uh, was that literal? The eyes-in-brain thing?" Harry asked, fist clenching around his wand so tightly his knuckles whitened.

"No, I think he was just being flowery. I think Willem meant he was going to commune with them, or do rituals or read … anything but using blood." Sirius shook his head rapidly, looking much like his dog-form. He was straightening, though his face was still deathly pale and his eyes seemed sunken in with fear. His pupils were pinpricks in his irises when he stared up at Harry. "He's afraid of the Old Blood. But he's so rapturously in love with the idea of ascending into some sort of godhood."

"So he's a crazy old coot," Harry said, trying and failing to force some humor into his voice. It wasn't funny. This felt like one of those big, overwhelming things. Like trying to visualize the enormity of the universe, or the span of human history from apelike to _homo sapiens_. The sort of thoughts that could give you vertigo if you thought too intently about them. ' _Not_ transforming _, but_ ascending _into godhood… into monsterhood…_ ' Harry thought, and swallowed hard.

There was the sound of tearing flesh. Harry whipped his head around to see Sirius with his wand raised, and the old man slumped over and dripping a silver liquid into his lap. ' _He hadn't even done anything…_ ' What had been inside the old man's brain hadn't scared Sirius, it had terrified him. Harry tried not to think badly of his godfather, he really did. Sirius wouldn't kill a person without good reason.

"He couldn't be allowed to live, Harry," Sirius murmured. He held his wand in a spastic grip, and he was looking out at the dark water. "One of them is down there."

"What?" Harry startled hard. "A Great One?" Suddenly the moonlight seemed like a harsh come-find-me beacon instead of illuminating, and the drop down to the sea, a lot less steep.

"Yes. The Vacuous Spider, Willem thinks of it as." Sirius sounded distant, like his mind was elsewhere.

There was a singing in Harry's head, suddenly. Wordless and welcoming. "Should we go down there?" he asked and then jerked back the moment the words escaped his mouth. He hadn't meant to say that. He'd meant to suggest they run and never look back. "Wait, no. We should probably go -"

Sirius shook his head tightly. "We should destroy it."

"If it's a sort of godlike being, wouldn't that be… kind of impossible?" Harry tried to imagine what a _vacuous spider_ might look like, but anything he pictured did the opposite of setting his mind at ease. A thousand legs, towering over them… ' _Ron would have hated it on principle alone._ '

"I don't think it's a complete Great One," Sirius continued, though his brow creased with obvious uncertainty. "I think it's one of those that were human once…"

Harry bit the inside of his cheek. "Sirius, I don't think we should be fighting any god-monsters. Not even incomplete, formerly human god-monsters."

"I think we're meant to…" Sirius was staring at the sea again, and there was something unsettling in his eyes.

' _Isn't there some old saying about how when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back?_ ' Harry glanced sideways at his godfather. ' _What was in the abyss of Willem's mind..?_ '

Sirius mumbled something Harry couldn't make out and then, like someone had flipped a switched inside him, he took off running. Straight toward the moon and the stairway that led into the open air. Harry flicked a jinx at his feet to trip him, but he'd reacted too slowly. Sirius dove off the edge and into the dark waters below.

Harry would never sit back and watch Sirius die. He shielded himself as best he could and he followed his godfather over the edge. ' _To both our deaths_ ,' Harry was quite certain, as the wind whipped about him and the scent of saltwater became overpowering. ' _But so be it, then._ '

* * *

 **A/N:** That took a good while longer than I thought it would, but here you go. Tell me your thoughts!


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